Musician Corb Lund was photographed in the Glenbow Museum exhibit he helped create called No Roads Here: Corb Lund’s Alberta on Saturday January 26, 2013.

Photograph by: Gavin Young
, Calgary Herald

He looks as if he just wandered in off the street, a paying customer looking to partake in a little culture on a Saturday afternoon.

Wearing a green hockey jersey, blue jeans and cowboy boots, the tall, lanky man with a mop of messy hair, ambles with fellow patrons through the second-floor exhibit room of the Glenbow Museum, stopping to admire one painting or photograph, peering into a glass case at an old rustic artifact, moving from display to display with no real plan, but taking it all in with complete and utter interest.

It could be anyone. Anyone with time on their hands and a sense of curiosity.

But it’s not. It’s veteran acclaimed Alberta musician Corb Lund. And he’s seeing the exhibit he curated for the very first time.

Sure, he’s spent several months on it, he chose the material, even provided much of it from his own collection. He wrote a great deal of the descriptions, and his songs play on an endless loop over the sound system in the room. Heck, it is, after all, called No Road’s Here: Corb Lund’s Alberta.

But on this Saturday, the opening for the exhibit, he’s seeing it assembled and properly displayed for the very first time. And he’s understandably pleased. And visibly proud.

“The did a really good job on the presentation, I thought,” says the Juno-winning performer while scanning the walls. “You walk in this room and it’s neat, it pops out, the colour scheme is great.”

It is, actually. Muted green, red and black give it a fittingly antiquated yet modern feel, and a sense of warmth that helps bring the old and eclectic objects — such as marked sticks from a native gambling game or old, medieval-looking veterinary tools — to life.

Which is, in essence, the entire purpose of No Roads, to bring the objects and the history surrounding them to life, by shooting them through the prism of Lund’s own personal and family history, which are both intrinsically tied to the region.

“In the beginning I was a little sensitive about it being too me-centric,” Lund says. “But they said that’s kind of what they wanted, they wanted a personalized vision of Alberta history. So once that was established it was kind of like, ‘I just get to run around in the basement and pick all the cool stuff.’ ”

The project grew from the musician’s artist-in-residency stint at the Glenbow last year — Lund being a natural fit, considering his unabashed pride in his prairie roots. But he’s also a self-described history “nerd,” who often mines it for his musical material.

It’s from that material — eight songs, to be precise, as well as the one that lends its name as the umbrella it all falls under — that the exhibit was shaped, falling into eight different categories with personal and regional significance: Veterinary medicine, prohibition, rodeo, gambling, ranching, the energy industry, wildlife conservation and Mormonism.

And, again, tying it all together is the Lund family, its characters and their experiences throughout the past century-plus.

It’s fitting, really, because he admits his love of history has come naturally to him, one that came from many discussions with his family members, including his ranching and rodeoing father, who would tell him tales about his grandparents and more distant relatives who helped settle the area, participating in early Stampedes and making their marks in other western traditions.

“There’s a lot of symmetry between the two sides of my family. They were both from Europe and they both came to Utah and if you go back far enough there’s Mormon roots back there, and they both ranched and they both rodeoed and they both came to Alberta. So the whole thing feels very meshed to me,” he says. “And it was neat because when we started mucking around in the Glenbow photo archives we found some of my family stuff in there.”

Sorting through all of the material in the archives, or, as Lund puts it, “running amok,” was an eye-opening experience he says he won’t forget.

In fact, standing among all of the artifacts he used for the exhibit, pointing them out on this day, subdued but wide-eyed — the set of grizzly bear chaps, for example, or the still that sits in the prohibition section — he also opines over some of the discoveries he couldn’t use, such as the fully functioning Gatling Gun, the 1860s forerunner of the modern day machine gun, which had to be left in the basement.

“I was trying my best to figure out a way to shoehorn it into one of the themes but it didn’t work,” he says and chuckles. “I was thinking about just sitting it in the middle (of the room) and putting a sign that says ‘Awesome’ on it. But it has nothing to do with Alberta history.”

So, instead, he used those that would tell the tale he wanted, fleshing it out with some objects from his family’s own collection.

Which is why among the many objects, you’ll see such things as: photos of family members riding broncs; his grandpa’s buckle from winning the overall Stampede in the ’30s; a spur that three generations of Lund boys — including Corb — wore while riding; a pair of rigged dice that his gambler great grandfather would palm in during games; an old family brand; a safety helmet and pair of gloves his brother, who works in the oilfield, donated to him (“Freshly soiled,” he says with a laugh); and even the cowboy hat of friend, rancher and musical mentor Ian Tyson.

Accompanying the objects are the rich tales surrounding them, such as the otherwise unassuming and unremarkable hunk of rock sitting in a case in the Mormon-themed space in the room. Lund tells the story behind it with some pride, relating how his great grandfather had a ranch in southern Alberta that Lund’s great grandmother didn’t want to live on, so she made her husband build her a house in Cardston, which he did, using the leftover granite that had been shipped here from B.C. to build Canada’s first Mormon temple — the oldest outside of the United States.

That temple and house are now historical sites. But that inanimate piece of rock, sitting on display in the Glenbow, is just one of more than a hundred that are brought to life, Lund thinks, by the people whom it meant something to, which, in turn, he hopes will allow others to relate to and maybe learn from.

“I was shooting for something that was a little less academic and a little more conversational in terms of both the write-ups . . . and also I tend to find interesting little wrinkles,” he says of his approach and his hopes for what people will get out of it.

“Instead of it being just straight history just finding little wrinkles that are personally interesting to people as opposed to sitting in a history class,” he says. “I’m a fan of historical stuff — I’m a nerd. But some of the stuff that makes it come alive sometimes are the human details. So we tried to find some interesting nooks and crannies.

“I learned a lot of stuff and I’m into this stuff. So I imagine the average person walking around on the street that doesn’t particularly pay attention to history there’s all kinds of stuff that went on that no one knows about. So it’s just shining a little flashlight into a big room basically.”

Which is, for the next few months, housed in a smaller room in the Glenbow.

One that Lund, personally and artistically, has a connection to.

And one that he sums up simply and quite wonderfully.

“History to me is obvious,” he says. “You can’t make sense of why things are the way they are unless you know how you got there.”

Especially when there are No Roads to travel.

No Roads Here: Corb Lund’s Alberta runs until April 28 at the Glenbow Museum. Lund will perform a musical performance March 2 in the museum’s ConocoPhillips Theatre at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Tickets are available Feb. 8. For an exclusive video interview with Corb Lund see calgaryherald.com.